It is still early as I get out of bed. The sun has not yet risen. I feel a sense of control that I sometimes get when I wake up before the rest of the world. I have the feeling that the day’s events are mine to determine, that I hold everything in the palm of my hand.
I get up to get ready for a short run. I throw on dolphin shorts and a T-shirt, a pair of sneakers. I go down to the lobby. But before I can get out the front door of the hotel, the woman behind the check-in desk stops me.
“Ms. Soto?” she says.
“Yes?” I want to get running. “What is it?”
“A package arrived for you,” she says.
She hands me a padded envelope with a return address from Gwen. I rip the end off. Inside, there is a gift box not much bigger than a book. On top is a note in Gwen’s unmistakable cursive.
If anyone can do this, it is you.
Track One —G.
I open the gift box to see a Discman with a pair of headphones plugged in, a CD already in it. It is Elton John’s Caribou. I look at the first song and laugh.
“Ms. Soto?” the woman says, clasping her hands together.
“Yes?”
“Would you mind terribly if I asked for an autograph?”
I sigh, but then I remember there are a lot of people who wish I would crawl into a hole right now. So I’ll take a kind face over that. “Sure, yes, of course you can,” I say.
She hands me a piece of paper and a pen. “Oh, wow, Ms. Soto, this is…this is just amazing,” she says. “Thank you so much.”
I take the pen and I scrawl Take ’em all down, Carrie Soto across the paper and hand it back to her.
“Thank you so much, Ms. Soto,” she says. “I’ve been a fan of yours since I was thirteen and you won here back in ’85. I was there in the stands with my father. He loves you too.”
“You don’t mind that I’m an arrogant, ambitious bitch?”
She laughs. “No, I do not,” she says.
“I’m going to win today,” I tell her.
“I have no doubt,” she says.
I nod at her, take the Discman out of the box, and put the headphones on. I tap the desk and smile at her as I make my way back toward the door. I press play and start running out of the lobby.
Instantly, I hear the familiar stinging riff of “The Bitch Is Back.”
I run on the sidewalk past the hotel. I breeze past people out for coffee, parents with strollers moseying down the street. When I turn the corner and Elton John gets to the chorus, I know—I can feel it in the way the blood is pumping with intention through my veins—that Madlenka Dvo?áková is dead in the water.
* * *
—
“All eyes are going to be on your first serve, to see who you are at thirty-seven. Knock the socks off her from the jump,” my father says to me just outside the locker room. “Scare her, you hear me? Scare everybody out there.”
I nod, staring down at the scuffs on my Break Points. I picked out the white ones with green stripes this morning, to go with my white tank top and tennis skirt.
This moment—my father and me here in the hall, waiting to go out—feels just like it used to. I’m back at war, after years of not knowing how to live during peacetime. This is the only place where I make sense to myself.
I pick up my racket and turn it around in my hand. My whole arm begins throbbing, ready to be used.
I luxuriate, for one moment, in the quiet din of the stadium that filters through the walls. I inhabit the silence of this moment with my father, when we are still asking questions and do not yet have to live with the answers.
“Te quiero mucho, pichona,” he says.
I open up my eyes. “I know. I love you too.”
“Go out there…” He looks me directly in the eye with an intensity I have not seen in years, maybe even since I was a kid. “And show them that the Bitch, the Battle Axe—whatever they want to call you—it doesn’t matter. They cannot stop you. And they don’t get to decide what your name is. Carrie Soto is back.”
I breathe in deep and then wipe the tops of my shoes clean and start walking—one step at a time—onto the court.
SOTO VS. DVO?áKOVá
1995 Australian Open
First Round
It is not deafening, by any means, but as I step into the Rod Laver Arena I can hear it begin. “Car-rie, Car-rie, Car-rie!”
I look up to see signs with my name on them. Welcome back, Carrie! and The Bitch Is Back! I smile at the last one, and I point to the young woman holding it.
I can only imagine what the sportscasters are saying in their booths, what delightful euphemisms they are using to describe just how “too old” or “too cocky” they think I am. It will be a pleasure to make them report my win today. I breathe in deeply, ready to make it happen.